Around 50 people gathered late last month at a small theater in Lockport, a small city 20 miles east of Niagara Falls. They were looking for an answer to one vexing question: How did my electric and gas bills get so high?

They traded stories of monthly utility bills that had doubled or even tripled over the last year and discussed strategies to protest a pending rate hike from NYSEG, the local utility.

But if there was a sense of solidarity in the room that night, those gathered were short on solutions.